MAZI as video streaming server

[acorbi]

Dear MAZI devs and contributors,

In the context of a grass-roots initiative based in Berlin (more details at the proper moment and within the proper context), I am currently researching/experimenting with the idea of using the MAZI as a streaming server/relay for live audio-visual contents.

A brief technical description of the application we are seeking to achieve would be:

In a public event, moderator(s) and speaker(s) are recorded live with a computer (RECORDER) equipped with broadcasting software such as https://obsproject.com/. RECORDER then sends the video/audio signal to the MAZI. Other members of the audience , not present on the event's room but within the MAZI's wifi signal, will then be able to connect to the MAZI with their computers/phones (CLIENTS) and be able to access the video/audio stream which will be embedded into a wordpress site (served by MAZI as well)

Some more detailed requirements would be:

• The wordpress site would be mostly accessed via mobile devices and therefore the video player should be rather implemented with HTML/JS (not flash).
• No additional software should be required for the CLIENTS, only their browsers.
• The website containing the embedded video player will be visited concurrently by something between 1 and 50 CLIENTS.

Some notes describing the current status of my research:

• Looking for lightweight streaming server solutions I have implemented a working server based on NGINX + RTMP module on a desktop machine. See https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-set-up-your-own-private-rtmp-server-using-nginx.50/ This solution is easy to setup and does the trick receiving data from RECORDER and serving it to other machines which consume it using software such as VLC. I have not managed to serve this over a HTML/JS video player embedded on wordpress site yet (seems that RTMP only works on flash-based players?!?!?)

• Looking into the guts of the Raspberry PI running MAZI, i have seen that it is running Apache and not NGINX as webserver.

Proposed implementation:

Apache does not seem to have an RTMP module such as NGINX does so a possible solution I am considering would be to run NGINX alongside, making sure it does not conflict with any of the ports APACHE uses.

• Once this is done, next thing to tackle would be the embedded player within the local wordpress instance. if RTMP indeed requires flash (or does not come along well with HTML players), I believe an alternative such as HLS should be prefered. Something like https://docs.peer5.com/guides/setting-up-hls-live-streaming-server-using-nginx/ seems to be much more promising and HTML/JS based.

Alternatives / questions

• What about installing/compiling ffmpeg on the raspPi as video streaming server?
• Does anyone know about any apache module which might be good enough for this?
• Would the raspberry pi handle serving the live video over the embedded player to a considerable amount of clients ?

Vision

Ideally, this would be integrated into the MAZI project as an additional application which admins would be able to switch on/off ( starting/stopping the nginx instance in case to go down that road or disabling the apache module in the other pictured scenario). The application could have a minimal UI similar as what is described in https://github.com/mazi-project/portal/issues/102

Here my thoughts, I will be continuing the research and testing with this and update you guys over here. In the meanwhile, I would be very grateful if anyone can share his/her thoughts and experiences.

[lucabaldesi]

Hi, I am the main developer of PeerStreamer-ng a live P2P streaming platform and I am working in the netCommons project fostering community networks and their services.

PeerStreamer-ng is a open source platform with minimum footprint (I usually ran it on raspberry pies) and a WebRTC interface. It uses the Janus gateway to convert from WebRTC flow to RTP and back. PeerStreamer-ng bundles RTP packages in data chunks and exchange them with a P2P approach. While the more instances are running the better (for the P2P sakes,) it in principle can be used as a federated server. Users have not to install anything (but they would gain if they had a close instance of PeerStreamer-ng running).

I have worked on Cloudy, which is a somewhat similar to MAZI, and I bundled PeerStreamer-ng in a docker container to be readily installable on the Cloudy platform.

I think it should not take much time to port PeerStreamer-ng to MAZI as well but, at the moment, I have no time to do that. However, If someone decided to spend effort in this, I can provide support and online help.

Best, Luca

[panosnethood]

Thanks @lucabaldesi !

The MAZI toolkit is just a web service on top of the main Raspberry Pi OS, so I guess if you have already installed it on a Raspberry Pi it should work.

Could you send us the installation instructions for the Raspberry Pi (and also usage instructions) to try it out?

The MAZI toolkit is currently working on the "jessie" version of raspbian, but given that the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ includes a 2nd 5GHz radio, which will make "meshing" very easy out of the box, eventually we will need to install the peerstreamer in the "stretch" version --- just in case this makes a difference for you.

[lucabaldesi]

Hi! You can find building instruction at this link. However, to ease the installation I suggest to use the docker container. Note that by now PeerStreamer-ng relies on serf to advertise available channels so, be sure to install and run serf on your machine if you want to install it in more than one node.

Once you set it up, just point your browser to http://:3000

[panosnethood]

I had the impression that docker does not work with the Raspberry Pi and building instructions are for ubuntu. Are they available also for one of the two raspbian images (jessie or stretch)?

[lucabaldesi]

Hi! I have been working with those Docker images on Debian (stretch) systems and Raspberry pies 3 B+. Docker has been working flawlessly for me on the pies. Instructions can be used interchangeably with debian as well, as I tested. I had minor issues making it work with Raspberry pie 2 but nothing really hard. I updated the installation instructions with more details and the full set of commands to be run on a Rapsberry pie 3B+ to set it working.

[acorbi]

Dear everyone, here is a small update on my progress towards developing a solution for adding Video Streaming capabilities within the MAZI toolkit.

After doing some initial research about webserver-based solutions, specially targeting apache, the most streamlined solution I could come up with was to Install a version of nginx which already includes the RTMP module aside from apache and expose a HLS stream via a m3u8 file

For that I followed this step-by-step tutorial obtaining good results: https://docs.peer5.com/guides/setting-up-hls-live-streaming-server-using-nginx/

In a nutshell, this gives you an nginx instance running on port 8080 (so it does not conflict with apache serving the MAZI's dashboard and webapps) which you can turn on/off to enable/disable the video streaming capabilities. Here a sketch of the setup:

I tested it with the setup described on my original message (using OBS streaming software) and, although the video is coming with a considerable delay to the consuming clients using VLC so access the m3u8 file) the quality is good and the setup resembles reliable.

Now, the next steps would be:

• [ ] Finetune streaming and server configuration values to decrease streaming lag
• [ ] Compile all installation commands into a script file to integrate in installation scripts
• [ ] Submit PR to https://github.com/mazi-project/portal in order to integrate this nginx-based video streaming application within the toolkit and provide admins with the possibility to switch it on/off. The contributing guide on https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki/Contributing is still outstanding, can anyone shed some light on the contributing guidelines please?

[haniavis]

Hi, It is great that you are progressing. Looking forward to integrate this into the toolkit. Whenever you have the installation script ready, just inform us to start the testing and integration.

[acorbi]

Hi @haniavis , will do!